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BigWorld announces BigWorld Education

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 24, 2008

(Canberra, Australia): Chief Executive Officer John De Margheriti today announced the appointment of Mr Adam Shaw as BigWorld’s Education Program Manager. Mr Shaw will help the company to implement one of the first Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) and Virtual Worlds learning resources and support services for educators in 2009.

Tertiary institutions and specialist educators are currently teaching their games courses using more traditional peer-to-peer game engines which are unsuited in learning about how true MMOG’s and Virtual Worlds are created. The new resources that will be made available to educators by BigWorld will make it possible for teachers and lecturers to offer students the opportunity to learn on world-class middleware technology that enables hundreds of thousands of players to interact simultaneously, rather than using engines that are restricted by the number of players.

John De Margheriti commented“We have many months of hard work ahead with educational partners to get this initiative off the ground. The industry as a whole needs to make it easier for motivated young talent to gain experience in using today’s industry standard middleware technology. These games are much more complex to develop for and this is a pro-active approach to prevent an industry shortage of experienced MMOG developers, particularly game programmers and game designers”.

“I am pleased to have the opportunity to work with leading game educators to provide them with the resources to create MMOGs and Virtual Worlds. The technology that will be made available will greatly enhance educator’s and student’s understanding of what commercial grade MMOG engines are about and also provide students with greater job prospects in this online age” said Adam Shaw.

BigWorld hopes that these specialist modules in MMOG game development will help to shape the way forward for today’s leading educators. Recently released statistics from DFC Intelligence show that“the total overall number of online gamers in the twenty leading online game countries is expected to increase 51% from 2006 to 2012” and that“worldwide online game revenue is expected to increase from $4.5 billion in 2006 to $13.1 billion in 2012, a 192% increase. According to mmogdata.voig.com, active MMO Player subscriptions have grown from about 10,000 as of April 1997 to approximately 47.67 million as of April 2008, and the number of active MMO Player subscriptions has increased by 63.07% per year on average since January 2003, and increased by 83.77% between April 2007 and April 2008 thus emphasizing the growing trend for demand for these types of games.

BigWorld Pty Ltd was formed in 2002 to commercialize years of intense R&D, which started in 1999 and continues to this day. BigWorld Pty Ltd is a privately held company based in Australia that licenses its BigWorld Technology Suite middleware platform to game studios and publishers around the world that are looking to produce successful next generation Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Virtual Worlds.

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